by Meg Wolitzer
Mostly, though, we stayed in, and I knew that we’d eventually turn on each other if we were trapped inside that tiny room all day. He wasn’t about to leave, though; he was a writer, or he was going to be one, and he needed to be there to write. He had some savings that would go toward supporting Carol and the baby, at least for a while. I didn’t have the same fever to write that he did. At Smith he’d encouraged me, but now that we were in New York, we talked only of his writing, and I didn’t mind. I didn’t think I had too much to say, and even if I had, Elaine Mozell had assured me of the futility of saying it. Joe was the one who would work on short stories, while I’d go out and make some money, supplementing the small income I had from my grandmother. So I made a few telephone calls, using the skein of connections I’d made growing up in the city, remembering that Candy Mullington from Brearley’s mother was head of personnel at the publishing house Bower & Leeds. Mrs. Mullington agreed to see me, and I was given a job as the assistant to an editor, Hal Wellman. Joe was thrilled; he loved that I had something useful to do and that I would actually be working in publishing, that I’d be around books all day, and editors, and potential contacts for him for the future, when he had a novel to sell.
Bower & Leeds was located on the ninth floor of a medium-sized limestone building on Madison Avenue and Forty-sixth Street, and I took the train up to Grand Central every morning, while Joe slept in. He admitted that he liked waking up just long enough to see me pull off my nightgown. Every day he noticed that I looked exactly the same as I had the day before; time hid itself from you, or at least gravity did.
The world in which I now spent my days was mysterious to Joe. He was grateful that he didn’t have to be there, too, but he wished he could invade it anyway, to watch me as I sat in my cubicle and answered the telephone for the cordial, overworked, and red-faced Mr. Wellman.
“What’s he like?” Joe asked.
“Mr. Wellman? Oh, he’s a prince. He talks to me about everyone there, actually lets me in on things. He treats me as if I’m more than an assistant, and he lets me handle the slush pile.”
“Lucky you,” said Joe.
“There’s nothing wrong with the slush pile,” I said, “except for its quality. Anyway, someone has to read it.”
At night, I brought home bagfuls of manuscripts. Together we sat in our hotel bed and amused ourselves over how bad they were.
“Listen to this,” I would say to him. “It’s a novel called Courage, Be My Guide. And it opens like this: ‘Chester Mackey had been looking in pool rooms and gin mills for happiness, until one day he realized it damn sure couldn’t be bought.’ ”
The ludicrous writing fortified both of us; it was a yardstick by which to measure ourselves. We read other people’s sad attempts, and we acted as though we were both far beyond them, although the ghost of Joe’s story “No Milk on Sunday” still hovered. But that story must have been an aberration. Why else would he feel so confident that the slush pile at B & L was filled with such unmitigated shit? He could separate the good from the bad; he understood the difference. His own work would grow, would get better with time. He had been very young when he wrote that story; he didn’t really know what he was doing then, and now he was starting to.
One night we went to a party at the home of Joe’s old friend Harry Jacklin and his wife, Maria, who lived in a walk-up on Grove Street. When we arrived, people lined the stairway, a powerful blast of reefer smoke drifting down. Joe led me protectively through the crowds, saying hello to old friends from Columbia and from the brief period of his life that he’d spent in New York with Carol. People were surprised to see him there, and of course even more surprised to see me with him, I could tell, and he had to quickly explain the situation, trying to make it all seem arch and humorous (“I traded up,” he said to someone, or, “I got myself a newer model. Runs more smoothly. Doesn’t throw things”). It became clear that no one had particularly liked Carol, though they hadn’t had the courage to tell him before, and felt great relief that now the truth could come out.
Joe ached for a drink of some kind: something clear and powerful to set him right. Soon he was drinking vodka and pulling on a joint, handed to him by a thin black homosexual named Digby, a dancer who’d been asked to join Martha Graham’s troupe, someone whispered. With the eerie strains of theremin music on the record player, Digby was holding court in one corner of the apartment, sitting on the radiator surrounded by young white women and talking about Negro rights. The women looked up at Digby with worshipful, half-shut eyes, as though he were Paul Robeson at a communist rally. What did these girls know of Negro rights? Not much more than I did, I imagined. They were strictly Sarah Lawrence or Bennington types; I could picture them dancing in togas in a field of flowers, and suddenly I wished I was dancing with them, feeling the mush of earth underfoot, having no attachment to a man, no terrible bed to sleep in, just being part of a chain of girls in a field. These thoughts were the result of the reefer stirring things up in me, I thought, and then I was even more certain, because within fifteen minutes I was doing an interpretive dance to an Yma Sumac record in the hallway, and from across the room I saw Joe watch me with pride and admiration that together resembled ownership, though of course I’d asked for it, I’d wanted it, putting myself directly in the line of his vision up in the landscape of Smith College.
Later, when the party settled down with quieter music and the dancing stopped, a few of the men went out onto the fire escape to talk, and Joe grabbed me to go with them. Lyle Samuelson, who taught linguistics at City College, lined up a row of spent beer bottles on the windowsill and knocked the first one against the second, which sent the third one down, though none of them broke, just rolled.
“Look, remember Ike’s domino theory?” Samuelson said. “There goes Cambodia, and Thailand, and, whoops, what the hell, there goes Japan.” Then he called out into the room, to no one in particular, “We need some more beers here!”
Distantly, a woman’s voice called back, “Coming right up!”
I didn’t know these men, and though I was happy just to lean against Joe and listen to them talk—for their voices were deep and knowledgeable, even if what they said wasn’t, particularly—suddenly another one of them appeared and I realized he was someone from B & L: Bob Lovejoy, a baby-faced editor who never talked to any of the assistants, never said hello, always looked uncommonly busy and imperious although he had only been out of college himself a couple of years.
Lovejoy turned suddenly, and though it wouldn’t have occurred to me that he’d know who I was, he said in a flat, odd voice, “ ‘Joan, Joan, the piper’s son, stole two pigs and away she run.’ ” Then he added, “Why’d you steal those pigs, Joan?”
The other men laughed vaguely, Joe included, though it wasn’t witty. What I felt primarily was the hostility in Bob Lovejoy, inexplicably directed toward me. What was I doing here, he was wondering, when I was only some editorial assistant? What was a pencil-sharpener, a paper-filer, a reader of the slush pile doing here on this fire escape with the men?
“She didn’t steal anything,” Joe said. “She’s completely scrupulous, this girl. I trust her with my life. And anyway, Lovejoy, she’s extremely quick. A very fine writer of the short story.”
“Well, that’s wonderful,” said Bob Lovejoy. “We need more lady writers. Though I hate to admit there are a few pretty good ones out there these days.”
He hated to admit it, and he was happy to admit he hated it. Lovejoy dutifully mentioned a few women whose work was taken seriously: an imposing, political playwright with the face of a sea turtle, a poet prone to sudden fits of self-promotion that involved giving impromptu readings of her own work at other people’s book parties, and a novelist who cataloged small-town goings-on with tattletale vigor. The novelist had the creepy demeanor of one of the children from “The Turn of the Screw,” and seemed to be a future suicide if there ever was one.
If I’d tried, I could have rattled off my own roll call of imp
ortant women writers: Mary McCarthy always came to mind right away, with her extraordinary prose, her architectural cheekbones, her hair pulled back off an extra-long, Mannerist neck, and her various, public connections to high-wattage men. That last part seemed to be essential; without those connections she would have been too free, too exotic, less compelling. I knew that she was impressive and beautiful and scary; it would be difficult for a man to find a way to mock her, and so I assumed that few did.
Instead, they admired her. They thought she was one of a kind; they were either silent in her presence or nervously chatty and needing to rise to the occasion. It was as though she existed in order to defy all expectations and to deflect the arrows of the men who were shaken by the simple fact that she did exist. And, oh God, was she tough. She would have to be, taking on politics and art, chewing on them like twisty bits of rawhide. She and one or two other, lesser female literary lights had a demeanor that lit a fire beneath their brilliance and gave it style, allowing them to slip through the swinging doors that were clearly etched with the word MEN.
But what happened to the talented women who lacked sharp cheekbones or an ease in the universe? The ones who had no attachments to powerful men?
“Women writers—even if they don’t necessarily take the world by storm, they certainly make life a little brighter,” Samuelson was saying. “At least, the tolerable ones do, anyway.”
“Have you ever noticed,” said Lovejoy slowly, as though introducing a theory he’d been quietly cultivating for some time, “that a surprisingly high number of them are mad as hatters?”
“We drive them to it,” said Joe. “That must be the reason.”
“Yeah, we push them to the brink,” said Lovejoy cheerfully. “Wouldn’t you say so, Joan?”
They all looked toward me expectantly, as though I spoke for all women and their potential for mental illness. “I have no idea,” I said.
“I’ve come across a few of that kind in my day,” said Samuelson. “Boy, they give you a run for your money.” The men all nodded and laughed easily, Joe included, though when he saw me looking at him he sobered quickly.
“You’re not one of them, are you?” Lovejoy said to me mildly. He leaned forward, reached out and then very, very lightly stroked the soft skin of my forearm with his fingers. I jerked back quickly.
“Don’t,” I said.
Lovejoy removed his hand. “Sorry,” he said, and then he shrugged at Joe. “It was just irresistible.”
“Like women themselves,” said Lyle Samuelson.
“Like women themselves,” repeated Lovejoy.
“Hey, Bob,” said Joe in a vague and muzzled voice. “Did you see the sign? ‘No touching.’ ” I knew, then, that Joe had been made aware for the first time what it might feel like to sit outnumbered among the mutterings of men. It was as though he’d been given a rare glimpse into what a woman felt and thought. He had opinions, of course, the typical ones of the day concerning communism and race relations and Dien Bien Phu, but when it came to the landscape of women, he was at a loss to say much of anything.
The men kept chuckling and nodding together, while I sat uncomfortably among them. Bob Lovejoy had touched my arm and I’d felt pillaged, interfered with, but hadn’t known how to respond aggressively. Men touched women, unbidden, and the women murmured “Don’t,” or shouted it out, or pulled away, and either the men stopped what they were doing or didn’t stop; it was the way of the world. I was here with Joe, and I couldn’t just get up and leave. I leaned against the railing of the fire escape and peered down miserably over the quiet street. Joe looped an arm around my bare shoulder, which was cold, in need of covering.
“Listen, you,” he whispered into the whorl of an ear that poked out from under my hair. “Let’s get out of here.”
And I was grateful, too grateful, as though he were saving me, and we extricated ourselves and left the party, walking together through the Village after midnight, leaning into each other once in a while to kiss, as if in mutual apology, stopping beneath a streetlamp at Sheridan Square, where a newsstand was still open, the final edition of the Herald pinned up like laundry. Below us a passing subway train sent up a blast of warm air. We smelled urine, and peanuts, as though a circus train were rushing by beneath us, and we wished we could get on.
One Sunday morning upon awakening, Joe told me he had to begin writing a novel. “No offense, Joanie,” he said, pulling himself from the bed surprisingly early, “but I have to get up. I’m going to start writing a book. No more stories. They’ll get me nowhere.”
He sat in boxer shorts at the writing desk with his little Royal typewriter in front of him, and he smoked and drank some Coke from a glass that until a few minutes earlier had held our toothbrushes. The walnuts were gone; since the incident with Carol, he’d lost his taste for them, and he never did regain it. I stayed in bed, enjoying the novelty for a while of watching him write, but finally I got bored and said I had to go out.
It was my parents’ apartment I went to, the first time I’d been there since I’d left Smith. I was scared, but decided I was bigger than they were. I had Joe on my side. As I’d assumed, they had in fact been appalled when Smith informed them that I’d dropped out; an irate typed letter addressed to me on my father’s letterhead had arrived at the hotel after they’d tracked me down. The letter called me “a disappointment,” and it was signed “From your mother and father,” with no mention, or even whiff, of love. Which is why it was odd that I was choosing to go there now. But the Waverly Arms was so depressing, and Joe, in his new, determined, novelist mode, was drawing up into himself like a fetus. Laura Sonnengard and the rest of my friends were off at college; right now they were studying, smooching with boyfriends, getting dressed in pristine sweaters and sensible shoes. I needed to get away from the grime of the room for a while and the silent, heavy presence of Joe. Reflexively, I thought I needed my parents, despite everything, and so I went there.
Ray, the day doorman at my parents’ building, didn’t know of my disgrace, for he tipped his hat and asked me how it felt to be a “coed,” and Gus the elevator man pulled the brass lever as we rode slowly upward and he told me about his son, off at New Jersey Technical College, where he was studying refrigeration systems. Then I was right there in the vestibule outside the apartment I’d grown up in, with the umbrella stand and the wicker chair that had never been blessed with the pressure of a human posterior. I let myself in and stood in the front hall, calling out tentatively, “Hello? Hello?”
My mother, in an aqua satin robe, appeared, and when she saw it was me she burst out crying—a surprisingly unrestrained bleat that made me want to run. I couldn’t comfort her; what could I possibly say? So we sat down in the pale living room with its low white couches and pastels of New York streets in the rain, and I watched her cry for a while. Finally she blew her nose in a handkerchief and then looked at me sharply.
“Your father is out playing golf with the Dorlings. We know that this isn’t the end of the world,” she told me.
“Good,” I said.
“But when the college told us this man was a Jew—”
“They told you that?”
“Yes,” said my mother. “We asked them. He’s a Jew, and he’s married, and somehow he’s convinced you that this is love.” Now she stood up from her couch and came over to mine; each of the couches was long and sleek, an individual ocean liner. “Believe me, Joan, I know how it is, they’re very persuasive,” she went on. “There was a man here once, a Mr. Milton Fish; he came to talk to your father about investing in his company. Something about textiles. I’ll never forget what he wore—it was a striped suit—and by the end of the evening your poor father was practically eating out of this Mr. Milton Fish’s hand, practically signing an enormous check to him that basically would have bankrupted our family forever. It was only when I called your father into the bedroom and gave him a talking-to that he came around. That he saw he was under this salesman’s spell. Which is exactl
y what’s happening with you and your professor. The powers of persuasion. They speak well, they pride themselves on their history of ‘education,’ as they like to say, and they know how to use words with plenty of syllables, and they’re dark and mysterious, so that you feel as though you’ve entered a Gypsy den, and how much more thrilling that must feel than being with the kind of boys you’re used to, like Alec Meers, or the Bexleys’ son, am I right?”
Her words were so rapid and wild that I began to blink like someone under a strobe light.
“Am I right?” my mother was saying. “You have been with other boys, Joan, no? I mean, have you been with them in a carnal way, as man and woman? Because if you have, then probably you’re choosing your professor for his skills in that department. They aren’t afraid of sex, not them! They want to do it constantly, even when the woman has her menses, and they—”
“Mother, are you completely off the wall?” I leaped up. “I came here because I was lonely and Joe was working,” I told her. “He’s Jewish, yes, and so what if he wants sex all the time; I do too.” She blinked several times in response to this. “But he’s a talented writer, okay? A good writer, and he’s going to become famous and won’t it make a difference how you feel about him then?”
“Not one iota,” said my mother, her jaw as tight as the curls on her head that had been plastered there very recently; I could still smell the carnation odor of beauty parlor, could conjure the metal combs floating like specimens in blue water.
It was as though, having read Joe’s poor story in Caryatid, I needed to defend his honor more fervently than ever; if I didn’t, who would? His wife, Carol, hated him, and Fanny might soon be taught to hate him, too. His fledgling attempts at fiction weren’t anything to write home about, and yet here I was: shouting compliments about Joe through the mayonnaise-colored living room of my childhood and hoping I would start to believe them. He was talented, wasn’t he? He looked talented, anyway; he was brooding and unpredictable and bridling with sensations I didn’t understand, sensations that I dubbed male. Male and solid and influential, the emotions of men at war, or men hunched around the smoking powwow of a poker game. I would tell everyone he was talented, and then he would rise to the occasion.